UM money crunch may point way to greener pastures

Time Out

You’ve read about it. Maybe you shook your head in dismay, or perhaps you merely uttered “I told you so” under your breath.

Big bucks are being cut from the state university’s budget — $10 million to be exact — and like most publicity surrounding the university, the athletic end of the chopping is getting the most attention.

President Dale Lick has faced his trustees, telling tales of woe about the future of athletics at the Orono campus. According to Lick, despite the much-publicized cuts already in place, there may be more shedding before it’s all over.

It all seems a little ironic — budget cuts, talk of dropping football, lowering the caliber of play to Division III status. Only a few short years ago Lick sat in his lofty perch above courtside in the Pit at Orono, prophesying the great things to come athletically at the University of Maine.

In those days, according to the new president, all of the athletic programs needed shaping up, from the quality of the facilities to the style of coaching. Visibility, marketability and national credibility were to be the new watchwords.

Several coaches felt the heat. One, Skip Chappelle, stepped aside to aid the process of putting the men’s basketball program back on the map.

Lick was certainly too visible then for a president who followed interim boss Arthur Johnson, whose idea of making a university credible was to place sole emphasis on academics and peak performance by faculty and students to reach that end.

Lick loomed over the athletic scene like a boisterous owner of a professional sports franchise. His image in his early tenure at Maine was not good.

Enter Kevin White, new UM athletic director. White was keenly aware of the necessary building blocks for athletic success: more scholarships, larger coaching salaries and improved facilities. He set out on a course of action that left much of the past history of the university’s athletic offerings in his wake.

Rudy Keeling’s initial salary, for example, was somewhere in the neighborhood of $50,000, a figure nearly double what Chappelle made in a good year during his 17-year tenure as men’s basketball coach.

The program, according to Lick and White, was on the upswing.

Here we sit three years later, and the building blocks under the new image of Maine athletics are starting to crumble a bit. As my father always taught me, if you build your house on sand, and then the rains come …

You know the rest of the story.

There are forebodings in the air at Orono that I may not be the only doomsdayer in the area. Popular women’s basketball coach Trish Roberts recently threw her name into the hat for a Big Ten job at Minnesota. Although Roberts was not offered the position, her application is a possible indication of her desire to leave Maine before bigger financial problems occur.

Out there, the Golden Gophers have a geographic base from which to draw crowds. Most programs at that level recruit area youngsters without great fanfare and expense. And let’s face it, the Big Ten is still the Big Ten.

The scenario will shape up this way: One by one, the current head coaches in Orono will drift away, with the exception of the venerable baseball boss John Winkin, who, by the way, would win under any circumstances. I remember “Wink” in his days at Colby College when his idea of a spring trip was a doubleheader in April at Brandeis University.

As the coaches move, they will be replaced by other young mentors who will serve their penance in the Maine woods with a phone in one hand to recruit athletes, and another phone to keep their resumes active.

Unless …

It would not surprise this columnist to see Drs. Lick and White look for greener pastures themselves. If things continue to get tighter financially, they will pursue other avenues as well.

At that juncture, perhaps the board of trustees will take a look at the way things used to be in Orono, and appoint a man like assistant athletic director Woody Carville to the much-deserved position of head AD. Carville, who has spent more than his share of time performing menial tasks at Maine, would blend the past with the present in Orono with a perspective that only he could give. It’s a move that is long overdue.

Budget crunches are real threats to any institution, but this institution in particular has had the proverbial cart before the horse for a long time where money is concerned. Unfortunately, we may lose some good people in the process along with those who were not prepared to deal with the stark realities of overemphasis in a school that survived more than 100 years keeping the proper perspective about state university life.